Wherein I occasionally rant on various topics including, but not limited to, PHP, Music, and whatever other Topics I find interesting at the moment, including my brain tumor surgery of August 2010.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Using Visioneer 7300 USB scanner with Mac OSX

Using Visioneer 7300 USB scanner with Mac OSX

So I have this Visioneer 7300 USB scanner that was acquired from a firing from a former job, since the owner didn't even want it back.

It's kind of a nice scanner, lightweight, with five programmable buttons on the front, such as scan and print with one click.

The UI for the button programming is about as bad as I've seen. I refuse to provide instructions because I basically click around semi-randomly when I try to program a button until it works. Kind of like Windows.

Anyway, I wanted to hook it up to my MacBook Pro, but it never seemed to work.

Then an upgrade to Windows made it not work there either because there was no driver allegedly, but I found that gimp could use something to make it work.

Actually, I think the driver for the PaperPort software was at fault, but I like gimp interface better anyway. Though gimp does take a long time to start up. Oh well.

So then I tried gimp on the Mac. With a bit of effort, I made it work.

Couldn't open firmware file (`/opt/local/share/sane/gt68xx/Cis3r5b1.fw'): No such file or directory

So I went on a hunt for Cis3r5b1.fw

I found a download on a Polish (?) site: Despite my complete lack of understanding of Polish, the download button was rather obvious.

Anybody remember when the internet was almost all English, and the Russian site 'demos" opened up and everybody and their brother sent them "welcome" emails and wanted to know what kind of demos they were working on and it was "Demos" the moon of Mars... I think they were astronomers or something. Sorry. I digress.

I created the gt86xx director in /opt/local/share/sane/ and downloaded the file there.

A restart of X11 and gimp and Bob's your uncle.

I made a test scan, and it took forever, and the white/black/grey scale was all whack.

But the next scan seemed to go faster, and I assume I can tweak settings more or less at random until the colors/grays come out right.

Anyway, that's how I did it, and it might work for you, or not. And it even might be helpful for a different scanner. Or not.

Or even a different platform that can use sane. Or not.

I may have left out a minor step here or there. I'm horrible at taking notes because I usually figure I won't get it to work anyway.